Serbia: Eight Former Officers Charged in 1995 Massacre Near Srebrenica

By The Associated Press

Sept. 10, 2015

Serbia’s war crimes prosecutors brought charges Thursday against eight suspects in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, when about 8,000 Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb troops. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the men — all former members of the Bosnian Serb special police — were charged with taking part in the killings of about 1,300 people in the village of Kravica, on Srebrenica’s outskirts. The victims were crammed into a warehouse and then killed with grenades and machine guns. Later survivors were asked to come out and then they, too, were killed. Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica in July 1995 and killed most of the town’s men and boys over several days, burying their remains in several mass graves. The Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and the army commander Ratko Mladic are on trial on genocide charges at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Serbia backed Bosnian Serbs during the conflict, but has pledged to deal with its wartime past as the country seeks European Union membership.

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A child mourned near Srebrenica in July as the newly found remains of 136 victims were set to be buried 20 years after the massacre.CreditMatej Divizna/Getty Images

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Europe; Serbia: Eight Former Officers Charged in 1995 Massacre Near Srebrenica. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe